Visualforce Custom lookup visualforce page

Question

I was wondering if there is a way to override the native functionality of the lookup field in Salesforce and replace it with a visualforce page. The reason I'm trying to override this button is because when the user does a look up, the look up returns everybody with that name. What we want to return is a list of all the contacts by account for the contact being searched.

Here's what I'm trying to achieve:

When the user clicks the lookup button my visualforce page will launch and allow the user to see the account and all the contacts of that account.

Is this even possible? What other ways would you suggest going about this?

Here's a screen shot of what I'm trying to change:

Thanks for all your help!

Answer 1

It sounds really like you just need to customise the columns on the lookup to make it better suited to your needs. If you go to Setup -> Customize -> Contacts -> Search Layouts, you'll see entries for Lookup Dialogs and Lookup Phone Dialogs, there you can edit the columns displayed in the lookup windows.

If you really need a custom solution:

You can't override the lookup page itself, but you could create a new visualforce page for your account, using <apex:detail> and other similar tags to make your life simpler. Then you could include a search section underneath, where a user can enter various search terms which you put into a dynamic SOQL query and then render the results for them to choose from.

Answer 2

yeah its possible by javascript as i did by visual force page that will show the records of related lists and upon selection id of that record passed to parent window by jscipt. and performed same functionality ..

Answer 3

As far as I know - NO. As a workaround you can use JavaScript. What we did in our situation? We implement everything in JavaScript. We created an inputText and right on the right of this inputText we placed image with this lookup icon. On image click we create ExtJS popup window (I think you can simply create VF page and show this page in popup window). After window was closed you fill in the inputText field.

Answer 4

There's no out-of-the-box override for this button, last I checked, so something custom would be required. If you're set on having a popup and do not want an inline solution, I'd recommend reviewing this tutorial to get familiar with some of the issues with popups in Visualforce.

But considering what you are looking to accomplish, you could also have your account and filtered list of all contacts associated with that account appear inline on your page when the user clicks a new, custom search button. Of course that page would itself be in Visualforce (or inline Visualforce in a standard page layout) - which you may or may not want to have to code and maintain.

The AJAX Toolkit might also be a good place to start if you want to go with a custom JavaScript button placed on a standard page layout.